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He picked up one more sign of habitation when darkness came. A small bubble skylight on the roof was briefly illuminated — someone turned on a light and two minutes later turned it off. Bosch guessed that the skylight was over a bathroom that had no window. And now he was sure someone was in the house.

As the hours passed, he pulled an insulated windbreaker out of the duffel for warmth and two protein bars for energy. He had to get up at least once an hour to walk off cramps, urinate, or work the new knee and keep it from getting stiff. He had completely forgotten about dinner with Hinojos until she texted menu options to him. He replied with a request for a rain check, and she seemed disappointed but okay with it. At least that was Bosch’s interpretation of her texts.

The coyotes came out after dark. Bosch couldn’t see them, but he heard them yipping and barking on the hill’s slope leading down to the reservoir. It sounded like they were in a pack and on the prowl. They were night hunters, like him.

The later it got, the more he questioned his decision not to call in the troops to take Novak down. But he also kept thinking about Charlie Lamb and the photo of Lorraine Henderson crumpled against the wall at MacLaren. And the first woman whose body he’d come across in the house on Wonderland with her blood on the walls and ceiling.

Bosch knew that if Novak was captured, he might be able to use the missiles to leverage a walkaway deal. Bosch couldn’t let that happen. He didn’t want the deaths of those victims to mean nothing. He didn’t want a psychopath like Novak walking free.

At three a.m. he opened the duffel, removed the holstered Glock 19 he had taken from the gun safe, clipped it to his belt on his left hip, and started making his way down the hill.

As a guide, he used a penlight with masking tape over most of the lens to dim the glow. He came to a wooden deck just big enough for a table and two chairs that had a stunning view of the lights of Hollywood, including the signature Capitol Records Building. Below the deck were steps made with railroad ties leading down to the backyard of a neighboring house. Bosch went down the steps. There was an unlocked gate with a BEWARE OF DOG sign attached to it, but Bosch was undeterred. He had seen no dog in the yard or being taken from the house for a walk the whole afternoon and evening.

He went through the gate and walked around a pool to a six-foot-high wall that ran between the properties. There were two lounge chairs by the pool with a wooden table for drinks between them. Bosch carried the table over to the wall and stepped up on it. He looked over the wall into the rear yard of the Novak house. A slight breeze was moving through the pass, and he could hear the glass chimes in the tree at the end of the property. He could see at least two cameras mounted under the house’s eaves. He assumed they were motion-activated and would send notices to a cell phone. It was just a question of whose phone and if that person was awake to notice.

Bosch lifted the duffel bag over the wall and dropped it into the Novak yard. He hoisted himself up on the wall, leaned his upper body over it, and swung one leg and then the other to the top, then pivoted and pulled his legs over. He dropped the final two feet to the ground, paused to check the feel of his new knee, and picked up the duffel bag.

He hurried along the side of the house that ran parallel to the wall. From the hill above he had seen that this was where pool and HVAC equipment was located, and there were few windows from which he could be spotted. There was also a side door to the garage. It had been Bosch’s experience that the garage was usually the weak point in home-defense systems. Often they were the easiest penetration points because they frequently weren’t equipped with alarms or high-end locks.

He knelt at the side door to the garage so that he was eye level with the lock. There was a dead bolt and a simple key lock. He retrieved his lockpicks from the duffel, then took the tape off the penlight and put the end of it in his mouth so he could use both hands on the locks.

The dead bolt was the challenge. It was made by a company Bosch was familiar with and whose locks he had opened many times. But this one was corroded and difficult to turn. It took repeated efforts before he finally opened it. He started on the knob, and it took less than a minute to defeat that lock. He opened the door and paused, waiting and listening for an actual alarm or a passcode-timer beep. No sound came. But what did come was the smell of death. Not strong, but identifiable. It was a hideous odor that Bosch had been familiar with since he was eighteen years old and crawling through the tunnels in Vietnam.

He entered the garage and moved past a silver Mercedes sedan toward the white van. He aimed the light through one of the rear windows of the van and saw a blue tarp covering something on its floor. He put the light back in his mouth and used two hands to quietly open the twin doors.

The smell of death was more intense now. Bosch pulled the tarp back, revealing three bodies lying side by side in the van. He identified one as Novak’s man Slobodan Marek. The other two were a man and woman Bosch estimated to be in their sixties. He noted that they had matching wedding bands. He guessed that the woman was Novak’s ex-wife and the man was her current husband.

The woman had been shot in the face, and each man had been shot in the back of the head, execution-style. It looked like they had been killed elsewhere and their bodies loaded into the van.

The van was parked next to a door that presumably led into the house. It had the same setup as the first door, a dead bolt and knob lock. Bosch reached for the picks in his back pocket at the same time as he tried the knob. It was unlocked.

He paused before attempting to open the door. He knew it would likely open a circuit on a security system and possibly trigger an alarm. He had to be ready for that, even though it seemed unlikely to him that Novak would have thought to get his ex-wife to tell him how to arm and disarm the system before killing her and her husband.

Bosch clicked off his penlight and put it in his pocket, then pulled his gun and held it down at his side as he turned the knob and pushed the door open.

The was no alarm.

Bosch stepped into an area that had a washer and dryer on one side and a wall of shelves filled mostly with household cleaning products on the other. It led directly into the kitchen, which was large enough to have a center island with a countertop stove. He moved around the island and through the kitchen, trying to see his way in the shadows. He stepped into a formal dining room with a chandelier made of hanging pieces of glass like those on the tree outside.

Bosch checked out the rest of the floor, clearing a living room, a TV room, and an office. In the entranceway by the front door, a spiral staircase led to the lower levels of the house. Bosch looked and decided it would be too dangerous to go down the steps, as he would be fully exposed. If Novak was lying in wait, he would have the upper hand and a clear shot.

He retreated to the kitchen, where the clock on the oven told Bosch that dawn was at least two hours away.

Bosch considered his options and decided to wait for daylight to take Novak.

46

AT SIX A.M. a coffee maker on the kitchen counter turned on automatically and started brewing. Bosch got ready, quietly opening the duffel bag and taking out the last of the things he would need.

It wasn’t long before he started hearing sounds from the lower levels of the house: a man clearing his throat and then one side of a phone conversation. The person speaking was Novak. Most of what he was saying was muffled, but then he raised his voice.

“Not until I’m clear,” he said. “You get me there and then I deliver.”

The conversation ended shortly after that. Bosch took what he heard to mean that Novak was planning an escape in case the deal with Cutler fell through.

Bosch heard footsteps. Someone was trudging up the spiral staircase. He retreated to the laundry area by the garage door and hid by the side of the dryer. He heard Novak clear his throat again as he entered the kitchen. Bosch waited. His plan was to take Novak at the coffee maker.

He heard a drawer open and close, then a cabinet door opening and the sound of a coffee mug being put down on the marble counter. When he heard coffee splashing into the cup, he moved quickly into the kitchen. Novak was standing barefoot at the counter, pouring coffee into a mug from a glass brewing carafe. He was wearing sweatpants but no shirt. Bosch saw a handgun and a satellite phone on the counter.